Adobe issued an emergency update to its Flash Player to fix two zero-day threats, the company announced yesterday. The updates affect all versions of Flash on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

The vulnerabilities currently are being exploited "in the wild," says Adobe's blog on the patches. According to the Kaspersky ThreatPost blog on the pair of zero-days, one attack targets "aerospace and other manufacturing companies" by tricking people into opening a Microsoft Word document with malicious Flash content embedded in it. The second zero-day targets Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X by tricking you into visiting Web sites hosting malicious Flash content, and it aims at Windows users by way of a Microsoft Word attachment delivered via e-mail.

Adobe listed on its blog the affected versions of Flash, and it recommended actions to take. Apple iOS is not affected, since it has never been compatible with Flash.

Adobe recommends users update their product installations to the latest versions:

Users of Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.261 and earlier versions for Linux shoul... [Read more]

Google, which controls both ends of the Internet connection for a significant fraction of online activity, has a lot of power over the Internet. A little image-format tweak to one of its Web sites shows just how much.

Few others have expressed much enthusiasm for its WebP image format, an offshoot of the WebM project to promote a royalty-free video codec. Google asserts that its smaller file sizes would unburden networks and help Web pages load faster, but as Mozilla likes to point out when grappling with such matters, adding a new format to the Web means adding a requirement that all browsers must support it in perpetuity.

Related stories

• Google's WebP crosshairs target PNG, not just JPEG
• WebP, Google's answer to JPEG, gets better quality
• Google releases Anthill to bake VP8 into hardware
• Google offers JPEG alternative for faster Web

That doesn't stop Google, and Google is a force to be reckoned with: it controls both a colossally important collection of Web sites and a widely used browser. That lets it bring technologies like WebP, WebRTC, and SPDY to ma... [Read more]

The Sony RX1 comes with an optional viewfinder, shown here perched atop the camera body in the flash hot shoe. The camera comes with a Carl Zeiss lens, too.

With the release of its raw compatibility update 4.04, Apple software now can handle raw-format photos from two hot new cameras, the Nikon D5200 SLR and the high-end compact Sony RX1.

The D5200 is a relatively inexpensive SLR whose 24-megapixel sensor looks to have promisingly high performance -- the top rating for an APS-C-sized sensor, according to DxO Labs' DxOMark test results. The $2,800 RX1 has an even larger full-frame sensor, also with a 24-megapixel resolution, but its design uses a fixed 35mm lens.

Related stories

• ... [Read more]